Organizational patterns

Organizational patterns are structures of relationship, usually in a professional organization, that help the organization achieve its goals. The patterns are usually inspired by analyzing multiple professional organizations and finding common structures in their social networks and support corporate memory of reorganizations and process changes. They are often used as the foundation of project retrospectives.

Organizational patterns are inspired in large part by the principles of the software pattern community, that in turn takes it cues from Christopher Alexander's work on patterns of the built world. Organizational patterns also have roots in Kroeber's classic anthropological texts on the patterns that underlie culture and society. They in turn have provided inspiration for the Agile software development movement, and for the creation of parts of Scrum and of Extreme Programming in particular.

An early explicit citation to patterns of social structure can be found in the anthropological literature.

Patterns are those arrangements or systems of internal relationship which give to any culture its coherence or plan, and keep it from being a mere accumulation of random bits. They are therefore of primary importance.

Kroeber speaks of universal patterns that describe some overall scheme common to all human culture; of systemic patterns are broad but normative forms relating to beliefs, behaviors, signs, and economics; and total culture patterns that are local. Kroeber notes that systemic patterns can pass from culture to culture:

A second kind of pattern consists of a system or complex of cultural material that has proved its utility as a system and therefore tends to cohere and persist as a unit; it is modifiable only with difficulty as to its underlying plan. Any one such systemic pattern is limited primarily to one aspect of culture, such as subsistence, religion, or economics; but it is not limited areally, or to one particular culture; it can be diffused cross-culturally, from one people to another. . . . What distinguishes these systemic patterns of culture—or well-patterned systems, as they might also be called—is a specific interrelation of their component parts, a nexus that holds them together strongly, and tends to preserve the basic plan... As a result of the persistence of these systemic patterns, their significance becomes most evident on a historical view.

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